Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman

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This is, as you will already have guessed, Avram Davidson’s variation on the ever-popular sleeping beauty theme.

Ever popular because it is ever fertile, never more so than here. Nor will you, I think, find any variant quite so difficult to harvest as this. It is elfinfield, to be reaped only by the seventh son of a seventh son, wielding a silver sickle by moonlight. Don’t worry, I am here to help you.

But first let me recommend three more-recent variations on the same theme: Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen; “Summer Wind,” by Nancy Kress; and “Waking the Prince,” by Kathe Koja. You can read all three, I promise you, and this story as well, without ever reading the same story twice.

In the high and far off times before women warred upon men, the tale of the sleeping beauty was told at firesides so that young women might know they slept but might someday be awakened, and so that young men might know young women sleep, and that gallantry and chivalry are needed, not threats or force. Perhaps the best way to explain the sleeping beauty story is to say that it is the other side of the story about the frog who is kissed.

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